Forming

This chapter covers one of the most challenging aspects of design – the generation of forms. Where do forms come from? They can be drawn from the site, natural or cultural processes, the programme, and many other different sources. Historically, form generation in the design process was associated with the artrelated aspects of landscape design. In fact one of the earliest textbooks for landscape architecture students, An Introduction to the Study of Landscape Design (1917) by Henry Vincent Hubbard and Theodora Kimball, argued that landscape architecture was aligned with the fine arts.1 In keeping with the École des Beaux-Arts traditions, if you were a landscape architecture student in 1917 you would probably be busy studying historic forms to be copied in your studio design projects. Yet, twentieth-century art was rapidly changing, as it was no longer securely tied to the task of mimesis – representing attributes found in the three-dimensional world. Cubism and other early twentieth-century art movements abstracted reality on the canvas, and in sculpture, photography, film, and theatre. A painting of a city, for example, didn’t need to look like a city one might encounter first hand. These changes in the formal qualities of art eventually influenced ideas about designed landscapes and the way they were conceived and theorized.